The Kill Room (Lincoln Rhyme 10)

"That's it?"

"Afraid so. Unsub Five Sixteen knows what he's doing." Sachs was looking at the photos of Lydia Foster's bloody corpse, which she was downloading from the crime scene team in Queens and printing out.

Lips tight, she stepped to one of the whiteboards and taped the pictures up.

"He tortured her," Laurel said softly but with no other reaction.

"And took everything Lydia had about the assignment for Moreno."

"What could she have known?" the ADA wondered. "If he had a commercial interpreter with him on the business trip, he obviously wasn't taking her to meet criminals. She'd be a good witness to testify that Moreno wasn't a terrorist." She added, "That is, would have been a good witness."

Sachs felt a burst of anger that the woman's reaction was less about Lydia Foster's death than that she'd lost a brick in the prosecution against Shreve Metzger. Then recalled her own dismay at seeing the body, part of which stemmed from her being too late to get solid information from the interpreter.

The policewoman said, "I had a brief conversation with her earlier. I know she had meetings with Russian and Emirates charities and the Brazilian consulate. That's all."

I never got the chance to find out more, she reflected. Still furious with herself. If Rhyme had been here, he would have speculated that there might be two perps. Shit.

Forget it, she sternly thought. Get on with the case.

She looked at Cooper. "Let's see if we can make some connections. I want to know whether it was Bruns or the unsub who set the IED. You found anything from the Java Hut scene, Mel?"

Cooper explained that there'd been very few clues but he had in fact made some discoveries. The Bomb Squad had delivered the information that the IED was an off-the-shelf anti-personnel device, loaded with Semtex, the Czech plastic explosive. "They're available on the arms market, pretty easily if you have the right connections," Cooper explained. "Most purchasers are military users, both government and mercenaries."

Cooper had run the latent prints Sachs had been able to lift at the coffeehouse and had sent them to IAFIS. They'd come back negative.

The tech said, "You got me a lot of good samplars from the Java Hut but there wasn't a lot of trace that could reasonably be attributed to the perp. Two things were unique, though, which means they might've come from our bomber. The first was eroded limestone, coral and very small bits of shell--sand, in other words, and it's sand from a tropical location. I also found organic crustacean waste."

"What's that?" Laurel asked.

"Crab shit," Sachs answered.

"Exactly," Cooper confirmed. "Though, to be accurate, it could be from lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, krill and barnacles too. There are over sixty-five thousand crustacean species. What I can tell you, though, is that it's typical of beaches in the Caribbean. And the trace includes residue consistent with evaporated seawater."

Sachs frowned. "So he might've been the man in the South Cove Inn just before Moreno was shot. Would sand still cling after a week?"

"These were fine grains. Yes, it's possible. They can be very adhesive."

"What else did you catch, Mel?"

"Something I've never found at a crime scene--1,5-dicaffeoylquinic acid."

"Which is?"

"Cynarine," Cooper said, reading from a computer database of chemical substances. "Most commonly it's the biologically active component of artichokes. It gives them the sweet flavor."

"And our perp left traces of that?"

"Can't say for sure but I found some on the doorstep of Java Hut, on the knob and on a fragment of the IED."

Sachs nodded. Artichokes. Curious but that's how crime scene work went. Many pieces to the puzzle.

"Nothing else."

"That's it for the Java Hut?"

"Yep."

"So we still don't know who planted the bomb."